January Thoughts

I know that January is generally the time when everyone surges back into a weekly routine. After the lazy days of the holiday period, I too crave the regularity of weekly classes. As it turns out, my January has been up-turned by an unusually busy period of dance work. Unusual both for me generally (I'm normally able to steer projects towards the summer months), and specifically due to an increasingly large baby-bump growing around my belly. In the constant change (of schedules and body) of the last few weeks, I've increasingly found myself practising small, regular routines, trying to piece together a full-enough practice to keep me moving-through whatever the day holds. If baby steps sounds like a helpful way forwards for you, you can find my mini-series of 10 minute classes for free here.

Practising

I've been thinking a lot about what this term 'practising' means, having recently come across the writing of Antonia Pont, a yoga teacher, poet, and academic. Pont writes that 'practising' requires 4 specific stages:

1. A repertoire of actions
2. Repeated at regular intervals
3. Relaxation
4. Repeated Repetition

A repertoire of actions

In the first stage you need to have a routine of 'doings'. In a Pilates context this involves a repertoire of movements that come under the banner of Pilates. These are necessarily limited to the specific modality you are practising in, so if you practice yoga, you'll be working within a vocabulary of Asanas. If your practice is running, you'll be... well... running. etc. etc. What I find useful about this framing is that it counters the idea that every modality has to contain every form of movement. Yes Pilates is limited, in the same way that Yoga is limited and running is limited. Rather than seeing this as a negative, practising takes it as a requirement. You cannot get to a level of practising without drawing up the boundaries of what you are practising at the time.

Repetition

Secondly, practice/ practising requires repetition. Who'd have thought?! You don't 'get there' when you do something once. You've got to return to the same material again and again in order to gain a level of proficiency that allows you to get to the point of 'practising'. We all know the fitness industry's obsession with 'reps'. I get it, repeating a movement several times consecutively is necessary when strength training. We do this in Pilates too, though admittedly we're less focused on the quantity and more on the quality. However the key difference is the attitude of repeating. We're not simply 'doing again'. In order to really get to the point of practice, we need to repeat with the aim of refining and re-learning. Repetition is not simply an in-the-moment thing. We repeat when we return to the same class, week in, week out. I sometimes feel that the space between classes is just as important as the class itself because it allows the nervous system to digest and integrate what happened in each session. As you'll often hear me say it's regularity, rather than intensity that pays off.

The Hinge

These first two stages are what Pont describes as the habitual modes of practice. They set up what might be described as a habitual pattern of regular practice, that we come to identify with e.g.: "I practice Pilates/Yoga because I do it once a week/ twice a week/ everyday" or "I'm a runner/ cyclist/swimmer, because I do this activity every day/ week". Now, most January blogs focus on motivating people to keep going once the initial energy runs dry. It's all very well on week one, but what happens three of four weeks in when life crowds in, days are long and we begin to tire. The focus of the fitness industry is around maintaining the habit, and I'm not saying that this is totally wrong, but I think there's another key detail that often gets lost. This detail is the key to shifting from a mode of 'just doing' to one of practising. The key to affecting this shift is 'inflection' . It's not so much a question about continuing to do what we're doing, it's one of inflecting what we do so we shift from the habitual mode to one of practising for itself. The final two requirements of practising affect what Pont describes as this hinge point.

Relaxation

The third stage is summed up in the term 'relaxation'. Yes, practising requires relaxation, but it's not the kind of relaxation that looks like sitting on the sofa with your feet up (which, incidentally, I've become quite good at lately). Relaxation here refers to the idea of 'not doing harm', of not pushing beyond a sustainable effort. It's a tricky balance to achieve and often one that gets mowed down by our keen-ness to hit our targets. (If you hobbled out of the gym after the second session in January, you'll know what I mean). The sustainable effort means that we can return the next day and do it again. Strength accumulates over time, and with it, our ability to deepen the practice further. But in addition to this, relaxation allows us to attend to the deeper nuances of the practice. You can't engage mindfully with what you're doing if you're operating right at the limit of your ability. Relaxation is about enough effort, so that you are stimulated, but not totally overwhelmed.

Repetition-in-itself

Following on from this, then, is the final stage. Pont describes this as 'repeating the repetition'. That's a lot of repetitions! And Pont goes into a beautifully philosophical argument around what this final stage means. However, without going down that route, the bottom line is that routine behaviours, repeated sustainably at regular intervals allows us get to know them better. This second form of repetition, (repetition-in-itself, for those of you familiar with Deleuze) is ultimately about getting to a point where the material sinks so deeply into us that we learn it on a whole other level. At this point we're not just looking for difference-from last week, last month, 3 years ago. Instead we find ourselves playing in the material, developing greater depths of nuance, so that even the limited vocabulary of a specific practice can keep offering up new information. Significantly, it's not about fixing or finding solutions. Practising is a laboratory that contains our continuous exploration. as Pont writes:

‘In practising… there is no way around problems. .. we learn that it is not a matter of finding a packaged solution, but rather of inventing a way to live with the problem better, refining our ways of moving, in all senses of this word.’ (Antonia Pont, 2023, p.151)

I think this really holds up in practice (pardon the pun). It's often noted that more advanced athletes and performers tend to favour the more basic, nuanced movements over the hyper-athletic. That's not to say that they can't or won't do the more exciting stuff, but they probably know that drawing back can be as informative as pushing forwards. Performance requires the latter. Practice is about the former.

Hope to see you on the Mat soon!

Next course of open online classes begins Tuesday 30th January at 6pm. Sign up HERE.

Reference:

Pont, A. (2023) A Philosophy of Practising: With Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.